SM Tip - Transformational Service

I spent last week on a week long choir/mission trip with 40 or so high-school and college students from my church, something I’ve been doing since 2000. During the week, our kids served in a homeless feeding program, built steps and porches for homes in an incredibly rundown trailer park, ran two vacation Bible school programs, and did a variety of landscaping and painting projects in a small Ohio community whose best days lie decades in the past.

Over the course of the trip, I thought a lot about which service projects we’ve done over the years have been the most transformational–both for our students and for the communities we were serving. Since service is obviously a huge part of Scouting, the lessons we’ve learned apply equally well to troop service projects.

In our ministry, we’ve decided that two factors are essential to transformational service:

1. To transform a community, you must work with an organization that has a clear vision and is moving in the right direction but still has plenty of need for volunteer help. Work with a rudderless organization, and you waste your time. Work with an organization that doesn’t really need your help and thus comes up with busy-work projects, and you waste both your time and their time.2. To transform your Scouts, you must work directly with the people you are serving and/or alongside the partner organization’s dedicated volunteers. The relationships you and your Scouts build with these people adds a human element that makes service far more than just another activity to do or another box to check off on the way to advancement.